Rifts in the Moonscapes

JULES VERNE: MASTER OF SCIENCE FICTION (236 pp.)--Edited by I. O. Evans--Rinehart ($3).

THE YEAR'S GREATEST SCIENCE-FICTION & FANTASY (320 pp.)--Edited by Judith Merril--Dell (35-c-)

Science-fiction has an honored tradition. It arises out of the craving for fantasy that has inspired writers since literature began; its space-time worlds and grisly "Things" are cousins to Homer's magical islands of monsters. But the old fictions made little pretense of being scientific (when Jonathan Swift gave Mars two satellites, he had little idea that his little joke would be proved true in the following century). Only with the great Jules Verne (1828-1905) did fantasy make a serious effort to build upon physics and mathematics.

An effort is all that it was. Verne's "science-fiction stories can no longer be accepted as 'documentaries,' " says Editor I. O. Evans, because they are riddled with inaccuracies. Moreover, a story like Round the Moon cannot even be relished for its fantasy value, because to modern "readers of 'space-opera,' a mere flight round the moon, culminating in a drop into the Pacific, seems almost humdrum."

Two Ways to Die. What still sustains such Verne classics as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Secret of the Island is 1) the vigor and quality of Verne's talent, 2) the Homeric nature of his heroes, villains, and imagined perils. This is epitomized in Captain Nemo, dauntless commander of the submarine Nautilus:

"The route is barricaded on the south?"

"Yes, sir. As the iceberg turned over it closed all issue."

"Then we are blocked up?"

"Yes . . . Gentlemen . . . there are two ways of dying under our present circumstances . . . The first is to be crushed to death; the second is to be suffocated . . ."

"My friends, the situation is grave . . ."

It is this formidable tone (parodied to perfection in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) that has made the eyes of generations pop with awe. They have also admired the precision and brilliance of Verne's descriptions: "titanic crabs pointed like cannon on their carriages"; "petrified bushes . . . scattered in grimacing zigzags." But no matter how exorbitant their "world," Verne's characters remain strictly human, sternly Victorian. When Verne died, it was not science that did him homage. It was Pope Leo XIII who applauded the purity and moral and spiritual value of the old S.F. master's 80-odd volumes.

A Pack of Janitors. 1957's S.F. rests on a much frailer human base. Most of its stories explore the fantastic world of outer space with characters of a type unknown today--inhuman humans subject to telepathy, telekinesis, multiple personality, and an infinite capacity for shifting to and fro in spacetime. As characters, they are deader than the planets they visit; as explorers, they are about as intrepid as a pack of apartment-house janitors. Samples:

P: In Damon Knight's Stranger Station, Paul Wesson, who has been "a space-dweller for most of his adult life," spends five months in the interstellar vicinity of a creature who keeps human beings youthful by exuding golden fluid from his pores. Paul is waited on, talked to and amused by a mechanical brain; he is fed by an "auto-chef"; his only job is to sit tight while the "alien" exudes in the adjoining duralumin room. But the "alien" presence gives off such a sense of "distress," "summoning" and "pleading," that Paul goes out of his mind. The reader is unmoved, unconvinced, and totally uninterested.

P: In John Bernard Daley's The Man Who Liked Lions, Lord Kjem, a time-defying peer, visits a U.S. zoo. To get there "he had forced his way through time with his mind-matrix," and "the rift he had made was obvious." Two interstellar detectives trace Lord Kjem to the zoo, engage him in mental strife ("[He] probed with an arrow-swift thought, but the other had his mind-shield up"), force him to reveal the exact position of his "rift" ("[It's] down there, behind the hedge opposite the lion cage"). But by mentally opening the lion's cage, Lord Kjem releases the big cats, who eat the dicks arrow-swiftly. Lord Kjem gets eaten up by condors. For readers with thin mind-shields.

P: E. L. Malpass' When Grandfather Flew to the Moon is a jolly British contribution that deserves note for presenting space-time in a nutshell, viz.: "They went to 1954 for their honeymoon."

P: Garson Kanin's The Damnedest Thing is about an undertaker who is about to embalm a corpse when it sits up, clears its throat, has a chat, gives fresh instructions about the funeral, then falls back into rigor mortis. Not only has this old stiff been around for a couple of thousand years, but it has the added disadvantage, in an S.F. anthology, of showing 1) no understanding of S., 2) no grasp of F.

P: C. M. Kornbluth's The Cosmic Expense Account is an amusing satire on S.F. A German prof's theory ("Functional Epistemology") is put into practice by a Pennsylvania spinster, who uses it to make people love one another. Before long she threatens to ruin the human race by turning it into a breed of simpering lovebirds. Of all the contributors to this anthology, Author Kornbluth is the only one who knows perfectly well that he is talking nonsense, and this gives freshness and intelligence to his writing.

"To be good science-fiction," says Editor Judith Merril, "a story must contain a rare blend of intellection and emotion; puzzle and plot must be integrally related in such a way that the human problem arises out of the idea-extrapolation, and the resolution of the one is impossible without the solution to the other." No horror in this anthology is so appalling as the fact that at this very moment there is a mind-matrix around that is capable of writing such sentences in the belief that they mean something.

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